Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Editors' acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- I The IMF, the World Bank, and neo-liberalism
- II Foreign direct investment, globalization, and neo-liberalism
- III Globalization of finance
- IV Trade, wages and the environment: North and South
- V Migration of people in a global economy
- VI Globalization and macroeconomic policy
- 16 The NAIRU: is it a real constraint?
- Comment by Robert Eisner
- 17 Internal and external constraints on egalitarian policies
- Comment by Robert Blecker
- 18 The effects of globalization on policy formation in South Africa
- Comment by Keith Griffin
- 19 Can domestic expansionary policy succeed in a globally integrated environment? An examination of alternatives
- Comment by J. Bradford DeLong
- Bibliography
- Index
17 - Internal and external constraints on egalitarian policies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Editors' acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- I The IMF, the World Bank, and neo-liberalism
- II Foreign direct investment, globalization, and neo-liberalism
- III Globalization of finance
- IV Trade, wages and the environment: North and South
- V Migration of people in a global economy
- VI Globalization and macroeconomic policy
- 16 The NAIRU: is it a real constraint?
- Comment by Robert Eisner
- 17 Internal and external constraints on egalitarian policies
- Comment by Robert Blecker
- 18 The effects of globalization on policy formation in South Africa
- Comment by Keith Griffin
- 19 Can domestic expansionary policy succeed in a globally integrated environment? An examination of alternatives
- Comment by J. Bradford DeLong
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Within Europe the most pressing economic problems from an egalitarian point of view are:
(1) high rates of unemployment and labor market withdrawal, especially among the least-qualified sections of the labor force;
(2) pressures to deregulate the labor market and allow a widening dispersion of pay and increasing numbers of insecure jobs with very low wages;
(3) pressures to reduce budget deficits and finance tax cuts by reducing the provision of public welfare services and levels of income support.
These trends have been at their most acute within the U.K., where, between the late 1970s and the early 1990s:
(1) the nonemployment rate among the least-educated men of working age tripled to reach one-third;
(2) the pay of the worst-paid 10th of wage earners fell by 28 percent as compared to the best paid;
(3) the level of state pensions fell by more than one-quarter as compared to average earnings.
Such trends have generated an astounding rise in inequality; by the end of the 1980s the ratio of the incomes of the top 10 percent to the bottom 10 percent had practically doubled, and the U.K. was challenging the U.S. for the title of most unequal of the advanced countries (Atkinson et al. 1985).
Even Sweden, which epitomized the egalitarian model, has not escaped. The rise in unemployment there since 1990, together with a widening of the previously compressed pay distribution and some cuts in the generous welfare programs, have highlighted the strains to which that model has been subjected.
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- Globalization and Progressive Economic Policy , pp. 391 - 408Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998
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